


Good Kitty

by orphan_account



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Hunk Should Be The Head!, Lion Swap, background Shiro/Keith if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2018-08-02
Packaged: 2019-06-20 21:49:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15542862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “There,” said Keith after a long moment when no one spoke. “Problem solved. Black wants Hunk.”





	Good Kitty

When the message from the Blades of Marmora came in they were running a training exercise in the desert while Shiro directed them from the ground and Coran timed it. They ended up landing their lions and standing in a circle between them arguing. “I’m going,” said Keith. “The Blades need me and no one else can handle the mission. This isn’t a debate.”

“Uh, yeah it is!” said Lance. “Because there’s no time limit on this thing and I don’t know if you missed it but you’re the  _leader_ of  _Voltron_! Heard of it? Defender of the universe? It’s kind of a big deal and it, oh yeah, doesn’t exist without the Black Lion and  _you_ are the Black Paladin!”

Pidge was nodding. Hunk decided he was staying out of this one. Lance was kind of completely right, but also somehow hadn’t noticed that yelling at Keith never changed his mind, and anyway Hunk had just found a packet of space cookies he'd forgotten about stashed in Yellow’s cockpit. He’d picked them up on the last planet they’d visited and he wasn’t going to let a bunch of yelling ruin it for him. He opened up the packet and took a bite of one. Mmm, wow, those tree-dolphin-thing aliens did some cool stuff with spices. Maybe he could replicate it. Weird texture, though.

“Lance,” said Allura, and Lance subsided still glaring. “He is right,” Allura told Keith. “Voltron needs the Black Paladin.”

“My  _mom_ needs  _me_ ,” said Keith. He took a breath. “And anyway, Shiro – ”

“No,” said Shiro.

It cut Keith off like Shiro had just sliced his tongue out. He went that quiet. Hunk looked up, saw Keith’s face, and looked at Pidge. People always forgot that Pidge was probably the one who knew Shiro best after Keith. Better in some ways, maybe, since she didn’t have all Keith’s Shiro hang-ups. Her expression said she’d heard what Hunk had: that there was something serious here, and that it wasn’t going to be an easy solve.

Shiro was smiling, though. “No, Keith,” he repeated. “Not me. I’m never going to pilot the Black Lion again.”

Keith’s expression crumpled. Guy had the most tragic eyebrows of anyone Hunk knew. “But –”

“No,” Shiro repeated, gently and finally, and that was that. They all exchanged glances.

“Right,” said Lance, visibly wrenching the conversation back into safe territory. “So we’re back where we started, which is that Keith isn’t going anywhere because we’re a team and team comes first. All right? All right!”

Keith’s eyebrows got if anything  _more_ tragic, but instead of yelling like they all expected and Lance was obviously already braced for he said in a small voice, “She’s my mom, Lance.”

Lance acted tough but he was soft-hearted as anyone and he immediately looked like he was going to cry. Hunk swallowed his mouthful of space cookie in a hurry and said, “Guys, come on, we can figure this out. Arguing with each other isn’t going to help.”

“Hunk is right,” said Allura.

“We know that out of all the rest of us the Black Lion will only accept Keith,” said Pidge. “So –”

There was a deep metallic roar.

The Black Lion rose to its enormous feet and swung its massive body around. It paced carefully around the arguing paladins, nudged Yellow out of the way like she weighed nothing, and crouched to open its gigantic mouth. The ramp extended down and touched the ground gently at Hunk’s feet.

“There,” said Keith after a long moment when no one spoke. “Problem solved. Black wants Hunk.”

“Uh,” said Hunk, staring up at the lion’s maw. Black kind of scared him, honestly. “Good… kitty?”

 

They agreed to finish running through the training exercises with Hunk flying Black. “We still have a problem,” Pidge said. “What about Yellow?”

Coran drew himself up tall. “I always knew this day would come –”

Hunk glanced longingly up at Yellow, who was crouched behind Black and hadn’t moved and clearly wasn’t going to rescue him this time. He  _liked_ his lion. She was tough, but Hunk’s brain-sense of her was pretty chill. If she didn’t have to fly around space shoulder-checking evil into the path of lasers or being a leg, he got the feeling she wouldn’t have minded just lounging in the sun full-time, maybe stretching her big paws out occasionally and unsheathing those massive titanium-alloy claws just for fun.

Black did not seem chill at all. It loomed over Hunk, waiting. Hunk looked at Yellow and sighed. He knew her really well by now. “I, uh,” he said, “I think she’d like Shiro. If that’s okay?”

They all looked at Shiro, who just smiled. “I’d be honoured,” he said.

Keith got into Black’s cockpit behind Hunk. Hunk hesitated before he sat down. “I think this is a mistake,” he said. “I mean, I really think this is a mistake, Keith. I’m not a Black Paladin sort of guy, you guys are all, you know,  _oooh_ and  _argh!_ with a mean streak – not that I think you’re  _mean_ , though you can be kind of mean I guess, I was thinking more about Zarkon, and obviously you and Shiro are both nothing like Zarkon except you’ve both kind of got an edge, you know? I don’t have an edge. I am not an edgy guy. Hey!”

Keith had stuck his foot out, tripped him off-balance, and dumped him in the chair. The chair slid forward. The cockpit lit up. Keith stood behind him and folded his arms. “Go on,” he said.

This was really happening. Hunk didn’t have a single stash of snacks in this thing, either. “Good kitty,” he said again nervously, and adjusted his position in the chair so he was a bit less sideways before he reached slowly for the controls. “ _Good_ kitty. Okay, don’t panic, Hunk. Take it easy –  _holy – ”_

The brain-sense of Black slammed into his head  _hard_. Hunk had been totally right. This lion was  _not_  chill. He had to grit his teeth against yelling a bunch of stuff his grandma would have been disappointed by. It felt like his skull was gonna burst with the sheer amount of  _everything_. Black didn’t have any of Yellow’s easy good humour. He – oh man, yup, not an it, definitely a he – felt echoing and distant and  _huge_. There was a lot of shadowy space in that massive mental presence, and a hell of a lot of power. Hunk had always found it weird that Emperor Zarkon still had such a strong connection to his old lion after ten thousand years of being insane and evil, but yeah, no, he could absolutely feel where Zarkon could have fitted his crazy-evil mind into this.

“Whoa,” Hunk said, when he could speak again. Sensor information was pouring in. Black’s range of awareness went well beyond any of the other lions. If a threat cropped up in the next solar system over, he would know about it. Hunk moved his hands on the controls and Black stood up and stretched his legs. He really was huge.

“I really don’t think I’m your kind of guy, buddy,” Hunk murmured to that massive dark sense in his thoughts. “But let’s give this a shot.”

 

Actually  _flying_ the Black Lion wasn’t so bad. Hunk had never thought of himself as a pilot, but he’d spent more than a year with Yellow so he knew what he was doing, and the lions tended to pilot themselves a little anyway. Hunk had looked into their system logs on the Castle once and figured out that most of the time only Keith and occasionally Lance were actually in full control of how their lions were moving through space.

“His top speed isn’t great,” said Keith, swaying easily with Black’s motion as he stood behind Hunk in the cockpit and sounding as if he wasn’t talking about one of the five fastest ships in the whole universe, “and he corners like a cargo hauler, but you can get a lot out of that acceleration if you time it right.”

“Stop backseat piloting, Keith,” muttered Hunk, still trying to feel his way through the basic manoeuvres they were doing – fly-by, nosedive and pull up, ground run, figure-eight. He remembered that the Black Paladin was supposed to be the leader and flicked on the comm. “So, uh, are we all doing okay?” he said.

“We are if you are, Hunk!” said Pidge, to a general chorus of positive noises.

“Shiro?”

“You never said Yellow was such a sweetheart,” said Shiro. Well, he  _sounded_ okay. Sounded like he was having a good time, in fact. Hunk was jealous. Flying Black wasn’t  _bad_ , but it was not a good time. “Are these pancakes under your seat?”

“They’re a traditional Olkarian energy snack!” said Hunk. “And they’re super good with maple syrup.”

“Tell me you don’t keep maple syrup in your  _lion_ ,” Keith said.

“I can’t tell you that, Keith.”

“Yeah, I just found it,” said Shiro. “And I’m having some.”

Hunk grinned. Okay, he was jealous, but Shiro was team and he sounded happier in Yellow than he had in months. “ _Bon appetit,”_ he said.

Keith made an appalled noise.

The others’ laughter came over the comm. Okay, so everyone was fine. Good. Back to the problem at hand, then, which was getting used to the way Black moved. Hunk had taken a good long look at the configurations of  _all_ the lions – because how many engineers got to spend every day around the most amazing ships that had ever existed in the entire universe? – so he knew in theory all the ways Black was different. For example he knew that the only reason Keith thought Black was slow was that he’d started on Red, whose numbers were  _crazily_ fine-tuned compared to all the others – proof if you needed it that Allura’s dad had been a compulsive tinkerer, the kind of guy probably who kept a classic motorbike in his garage and kept upgrading it with better and better engines. Green was built on the same basic configuration as Red and had received a fair bit of tinkering of her own, but it was tinkering of a different kind, systems work rather than speed junkie stuff: she had a lot of extra sensors and processing capacity which her first paladin must have put in, and then Pidge had added all sorts of cool shit on top of that. Blue and Yellow, of course, were both bigger and less manoeuvrable. Hunk was fairly sure Blue had been the first lion built: she was the least specialised, the happy medium of them all, heavy enough for close combat and fast enough for dogfights. And Yellow was a dreadnought, of course.

But Black – Black was something else.

Hunk was sweating by the time they’d run the full forty-five minute flight drill. “Okay, guys, take a break,” he said, when he remembered he was the leader and it was up to him to say when they were done. “I’m gonna sit here and try to, I don’t know, bond.”

“I’ll leave,” said Keith. “I need to go anyway, the mission’s waiting on me. And you’ve got this.”

Hunk turned the comms off before Keith could let himself out of the cockpit and said, “Hey, wait, help me out here. You know Black, right?”

Keith nodded.

“Because I still don’t know about this,” Hunk said. “I’m  _not_ a leader guy. I’m just, you know, me. Out of all of us I’m the  _last_ person who should be leader, probably.” He thought about it. “Maybe second-last. But Allura’s right there, you know? And what if I can’t even form Voltron? Or – Black does the brunt of  _piloting_ Voltron, and I’m not you or Shiro, I can’t pilot a giant awesome robot! I don’t have any piloting instinct, I basically just let Yellow fly me around half the time!”

“You don’t need to be a great pilot to be the head,” said Keith. “That’s,” he made a face, “what the Red Paladin is for. Don’t tell Lance I said that. But you can pull together all the instinct, or anything else you don’t have, from the others. It’s why Voltron’s a team.”

Hunk said in a small voice, “I don’t get why he picked me.”

“Black’s smarter than the other lions,” said Keith after a moment. “I mean, I don’t know. There’s more of him.”

“No kidding.”

“He’s more complicated,” said Keith. “Maybe because he’s had more paladins. Maybe because it was Zarkon first, even. Or,” he ducked his head, “what happened with Shiro. I don’t know. What I’m saying is, you should ask him.”

 

All right. All right,  _ask_ the giant scary lion what his deal was. Hunk settled back into the pilot’s chair when Keith was gone and sighed. “Bonding,” he muttered. “Okay, bonding.” He closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind.

Eventually he opened one eye and said, “Is this working?”

Black gave him nothing.

“You are  _difficult_ ,” said Hunk. “Come on.” He closed his eyes again, squeezed them shut, put his hands out to the controls and muttered, “ _Talk_ to me.”

Reality dropped away.

“What – what – whoa!” Hunk said. He stared. He was  _standing_ in that vast dark space he’d sensed when he first connected with Black’s mental presence. It was all around him. “Wow, this is creepy. Um, nothing personal. Where… am I?”

Nothing.

“Where are you?” Hunk said.

He looked around. Was this where Shiro had been during the time when he’d been sort-of dead? Logically it kind of had to be. Hunk shivered. It was  _dark_. “Good kitty,” he muttered, “good kitty. Come on, Hunk. Okay. There’s nothing  _here_ , so probably what I should do is walk until I find something. Right? Right? Right.”

He squared his shoulders, turned around confidently, took one step forward, and screamed like a little girl.

“Whoa! Whoa whoa whoa,  _wow_ , holy, wow,” he said, when he’d got his breath back. That had been  _Zarkon_. Just standing there in the void, huge and grim and helmeted, staring at Hunk. The vision had vanished when Hunk yelled. “It’s fine that I screamed, anyone would scream, Zarkon’s a scary guy,” Hunk said aloud. He couldn’t imagine Keith screaming. Or Shiro. “Look, are you  _sure_ I’m your paladin?”

No answer. Hunk summoned all his courage and took another step. The ghostly shape of Zarkon didn’t reappear, but as he kept going he glimpsed another figure in the void. It was smudgy and uncertain in shape, but when Hunk got closer it resolved into Shiro. “That’s not the actual Shiro, right?” Hunk said. “That’s you showing me something. That’s your memory.” Wow, Yellow couldn’t do anything  _like_ this. Keith hadn’t been kidding when he said Black was complicated.

When he got closer the Shiro-ghost vanished just like the image of Zarkon had. After that Hunk wasn’t surprised to run into ghost Keith a bit further on. He  _was_ taken aback when the lion showed him Shiro again, until he realised that this second one never fully lost its smudginess and uncertainty, as if it wasn’t quite sure about  _being_ Shiro, and it occurred to him that technically he wasn’t Black’s fourth paladin but its fifth. He shivered. “Why are you so spooky!" he yelled at the emptiness.

Nothing answered, but creepy smudge clone Shiro disappeared as well, and was replaced by a pair of gigantic paws. Hunk tilted his head back. Far above him the Black Lion’s golden eyes stared down.

“Are we bonding?” Hunk asked him. “Is this bonding?”

Of course the lion didn’t say anything.

“Great,” said Hunk. “I’ll just…” just what? He reached into his pocket and he didn’t even have those space cookies. “This sucks.”

He sighed. He sat down by Black’s massive ghost feet. Black didn’t move. Hunk closed his eyes and tried to reach out.

Nothing. Emptiness. Black was just empty. It was crazy that something so big could be so empty, so… Hunk frowned… so full of emptiness. That was weird. Black was full of –

__–_  grief upon grief, first for a wife and then for a world –_

__–_  running out of time and knowing there was too much to do and the memory of every prisoner who died in the arena while you went on –_

__–_  no please Shiro please no no no –_

__–_  sometimes in the dark you hear a strange kind of static –_

“Eesh,” said Hunk. “I didn’t realise you’re full of  _angst_.”

Black, of course, said nothing. Black was prepared to do what needed to be done. Black would avenge a dead world. Black would save the universe. Black would uphold the only legacy that mattered.

“No, no, come on,” Hunk said, “do you even get what we’re actually doing here?”

The ghost lion looked silently down at him, and then abruptly it folded itself down onto its paws so that its huge head was level with Hunk. It was actually slightly smaller in here than it was in real life – big, sure, but it was sized more like a really big animal than an actual space ship. Hunk cautiously patted it on the side of its face. “Good kitty,” he said. “Is that why me? Because I’m not all tragic backstory all the time?”

This silence felt more cautiously interested than bleak and vast.

“You, what, needed a break?” Hunk said. But nope, that wasn’t it either. Black couldn’t take a break from being himself. Hunk thought about it like an engineering problem. Voltron was made of putting different stuff together, right? And different people gave different stuff to the team. The Red Paladin was for that piloting instinct, Keith had said.

What was the Black Paladin for?

Decisions. Determination.  _Direction_.

Being Black’s pilot was about knowing what needed to be done. It was about knowing  _why_. And that was cool, because Hunk did pretty much know why.

“Listen,” he said, “let me tell you something.” He leaned against the lion’s side. It had shrunk again. It was actually lion-sized now. Hunk put his arm companionably over its neck. “I met this girl,” he said. “This really amazing and cool girl. I like her a lot, actually, though the whole defending the universe deal doesn’t leave a lot of time over for trying to build anything, and long distance is hard anyway, and she might not be interested, you know? You probably don’t know. You’re a giant magic spaceship lion, romantic problems might not be a thing you know about.” Hunk thought about the bitter blasts of memory he’d felt a moment ago. Shiro not so much, but Zarkon – and, actually, Keith –

“Maybe you do,” he conceded. “But that’s not really the point anyway. Here’s my point: when I met Shay, she had never seen the sky.”

And he explained the whole thing. Hunk wasn’t the best storyteller, he knew that about himself, but Black seemed interested. Or polite, but Hunk was betting on interested. “And there are still people in the universe who have never seen the sky,” he finished. “And you and the other lions, and all of us, we  _do_ get to see it. We get to fly, which is incredible! But Voltron isn’t just about doing cool stuff, and it isn’t just about how bad stuff happened in our lives, you know? We’re just five people. Well, six people, altogether.” Come to think of it, it would be a really bad idea for Black to choose Allura and get another heap of my-world-is-dead angst on top of the Zarkon pile he already had. Maybe that was how that other reality had ended up with a scary Empress Allura in it. “We’ve all got our own stuff going on. But the thing about Voltron is that  _everyone_ has stuff going on. Everyone in the whole universe. And we’re here to stop some of the worst stuff happening, and to make sure that whatever else happens, at least they can see the sky.”

Black had shrunk down  _again_ , and now he was cat-sized, and cat-shaped, though the markings were kind of weird for a cat. Hunk got a vague sense of what he now knew was Zarkon memory,  _weird,_  and recognised it as an Altean species. Come to think of it, the Alteans must have had cat-shaped animals – otherwise why would Allura’s dad have been so into lions?

He picked the cat up and scratched it behind its weird little ear tufts. “Good kitty,” he said.

Black purred.

The edges of the cockpit started to reappear around Hunk, and Black’s ghost-form went transparent. Somewhere overhead the darkness of the shadowspace inside the lion was starting to open out a bit as it dissolved. Without even looking, Hunk knew that there was a sky.

 

When the others got back into their lions to run the rest of the day’s training Hunk said, “All right, are you guys ready for this?”

“We are if you are, Hunk,” said Shiro.

“Never been readier,” Hunk said. Black was still a massive effort to keep in his head, but he wasn’t an active headache now. And through him Hunk could feel all the rest of them, his team, there to defend the universe. They were all connected – even Keith, who hadn’t waited around during their break, gone straight off on his Blades mission. He was still part of Voltron. So was Allura’s dad, echoed in Red’s speed and precision and excited brilliance. So were the other original paladins, even Zarkon. They were all in this together, and they had a thousand skies to save.

“Okay,” Hunk said. “It’s time to  _form Voltron!_ ”

**Author's Note:**

> I know I'm very far gone for a fandom when I'm literally just writing gen.
> 
> I'm on [tumblr](http://emilyenrose.tumblr.com)!


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